Please help us continue to provide you with free, quality journalism by turning off your ad blocker on our site.

Thank you for signing in.

If this is your first time registering, please check your inbox for more information about the benefits of your Forbes account and what you can do next!

I agree to receive occasional updates and announcements about Forbes products and services. You may opt out at any time.

I'd like to receive the Forbes Daily Dozen newsletter to get the top 12 headlines every morning.

Forbes takes privacy seriously and is committed to transparency. We will never share your email address with third parties without your permission. By signing in, you are indicating that you accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Statement.

We are a nation of scanners when consuming online content. We have so many sources of information to explore that each of us creates habitual systems to help us cope with the quantity and give us a fighting chance to find the needles of value we seek within this informational haystack.

So, as a small businessperson who may be creating your own content, you keep this top-of-mind: You have to structure your online content to let the viewer (who is not yet a “reader”) find and understand your main point quickly. You must help your audience decide to stick with you by being succinct and clear in your narrative.

This allows the viewer to decide whether it is worth his or her time to transition to “reader” and absorb your content more deeply.

So, get to your point quickly when writing for the web!

Your “other” audience over at Bing,
Google, et al., is also paying attention to how you structure your content. Search engines assess your posts or articles in part based on the appearance, the frequency and the position of your keyword phrases within title and body copy. It will help your SEO performance if you spend the time making sure the top of your well-crafted opus works hard to clearly and consistently present your value proposition or theme.

High School English Still Rules!

Remember those English writing assignments most of you agonized through (not me, I like to write)? It turns out that your English teacher really was trying to embed a useful universal truth into your brain with that Classic Essay Composition format:

Tell them what you plan to tell them (Introduction)

Tell them (the body of your work, where interested readers will find supporting ideas or more detailed valuable advice)

Tell them what you told them (Conclusion)

Even if you plan to “hook” your audience with a storyline, you should weave the main point into that introduction. Example:

“Remember that fellow Jack who had a thing about jumping lit candlesticks? Turns out he had his pants insured.”

Support your narrative with visual appeal.

Not surprisingly, supportive graphics (including embedded video, but also simple features like bolded subheads) attract the eye and make visitors stay longer and scroll down further. HubSpot, the inbound marketing agency, did a nice review on this topic using some data from a friendly competitor to Forbes.com. The salient points:

10% of viewers open your article, but do not scroll.

Even engaged readers tend to opt out of articles about 60% of the way down the page.

Big takeaways you should, well, take away from the data:

Your conclusion may not matter much, so don’t spend much time on it.

Place calls to action (CTAs) up the page as well as at the end.

Set your CTAs off in sidebars or use images like buttons to present them, as well as using contextual links.

In conclusion,

Get to the point when writing online content!

How did I do? Did I follow my own advice? If you got this far, let me know!

I work with start-ups and other small and mid-sized businesses to create a more focused, disciplined marketing culture within their organization. Together we focus their…

I work with start-ups and other small and mid-sized businesses to create a more focused, disciplined marketing culture within their organization. Together we focus their money and time on just those initiatives that make the most sense given their available resources. This sets them up for faster growth. Some clients call me their “rent-a-marketing guy,” as I am a jack-of-all-trades who works on the whole marketing mix, not just one specialty. That said, I seem to spend most of my time on content marketing these days, an area that bedevils smaller businesses. More broadly, my goal is always to work myself out of a job, as the company grows to the point where it can replace me with a full-time marketing executive.